"Giorgione is regarded as a unique figure in the history of art: almost no other Western painter has left so few secure works and enjoyed such fame..." Sylvia Ferino-Pagden.

My website, MyGiorgione, now includes my interpretations of Giorgione's "Tempest" as "The Rest on the Flight into Egypt"; his "Three Ages of Man" as "The Encounter of Jesus with the Rich Young Man"; Titian's, "Sacred and Profane Love" as "The Conversion of Mary Magdalen"; and Titian's "Pastoral Concert" as his "Homage to Giorgione".

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Giorgione's "Adoration of the Shepherds", often called the "Allendale Adoration", is one of the most popular paintings in Washington's National Gallery. At this time of year it is a Christmas card perennial. It was also used in one of the most popular US stamp issues.

"In 1971, an incredible 1.2 billion
copies of a single postage stamp were printed by the U.S. Postal Service. It
was the largest stamp printing order in the world since postage stamps were
first introduced in 1840. It was almost ten times larger that the usual
printing of an American commemorative stamp. The stamp was one of two Christmas
stamps issued that year. It depicted a Nativity scene by the Italian painter Giorgione, Adoration of the Shepherds, and portrayed Mary, Joseph, the
Christ Child, and two shepherds." (M.W. Martin: “Christmas in Stamps,” in Catholic Digest Christmas Book, ed. Father Kenneth Ryan, St. Paul, Minnesota, 1977.)

The scene is so familiar that it is easy to overlook its layers of meaning. Even a modern observer can see that this newborn King is not protected by armed guards. There is no need to bribe or otherwise court influence with bureaucrats acting as intermediaries. Anyone, even the simplest and the humblest, can approach this King directly and in his or her own fashion.

For those interested in a discussion of the painting, I reproduce an earlier post below. I include some introductory material on Giorgione. Merry Christmas.

Giorgione is the most mysterious and perhaps
the greatest of all Venetian Renaissance artists. Mysterious not only because
so little is known about his short life, but also because no other great
painter’s work has led to so many questions of attribution and interpretation.

Giorgione was a “nickname” and contemporary
documents refer to the painter as Zorzo da Castelfranco. Castelfranco is a
walled town west of Treviso. about an hour away from Venice via modern commuter
rail. We do not know how or when the young Giorgione arrived in Venice. In
those days it is likely that he traveled down the Brenta to Padua and then on
to Venice by canal. We do know that by the time of his death in 1510 at about
the age of 33, he had become the favorite painter of the Venetian aristocracy.

The subject of the "Allendale adoration" is a
depiction of the adoration of the shepherds who have left their flocks to seek
out the newborn Savior after hearing the angel’s announcement.

Now when the angels had gone from
them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “let us go to Bethlehem
and see this thing that has happened which the Lord has made know to us..” So
they hurried away and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in a manger.

Luke’s account of the angelic appearance to the shepherds is
the traditional gospel at the midnight Mass on Christmas . The actual arrival
of the shepherds at the stable in Bethlehem is the passage used for the gospel
reading for the Christmas Mass at dawn.

The relatively small size of the painting indicates that it
was done not as an altarpiece but for private devotion. Although the subject is
clear, there is a deeper meaning.* Why is the infant Jesus lying on the rocky
ground and not in a manger or feeding trough? Why is he naked? Where are the
swaddling clothes?

Actually the newborn infant is lying on a white cloth that
just happens to be on the ends of Mary’s elaborate blue robe that the artist
has taken great pains to spread over the rocky ground. Giorgione is here using
a theme employed earlier by Giovanni Bellini and later by Titian in their
famous Frari altarpieces. The naked Christ is the Eucharist that lies on the
stone altar at every Mass. The altar is covered with a white cloth that in Rona
Goffen’s words “recalls the winding cloth, ritualized as the corporale, the cloth spread on the altar
to receive the Host of the Mass.” In Franciscan spirituality Mary is regarded
as the altar.

Clearly, the viewer-worshipper is
meant to identify the Madonna with the altar and the Child with the Eucharist.
Bellini's visual assertion of this symbolic equivalence is explained by a
common Marian epithet. The Madonna is the "Altar of Heaven." the Ara
Coeli, that contains the eucharistic body of Christ” Ave verum Corpus, natum de
Maria Virgine.**

The “Adoration of the Shepherds” represents the first Mass.
This is not such an unusual concept. Many years ago I attended a talk on the
famous Portinari altarpiece that now hangs in the Uffizi. The speaker was Fr.
Maurice McNamee, a Jesuit scholar, who argued that Hugo van der Goes had also
illustrated a Mass in that Netherlandish altarpiece around the year 1475. His
argument centered on the spectacular garments of the kneeling angels that he
identified as altar servers wearing vestments of the time. He called them
“vested angels,” and they are the subject of his 1998 study, “Vested Angels,
Eucharistic Allusions in Early Netherlandish Painting.”

His Eucharistic interpretation explained the naked infant on
the hard, rocky ground. The infant Christ is the same as the sacrificial Christ
on the Cross. In a study of Mary in Botticelli’s art Alessandra Galizzi Kroegel
referred to this connection.

it needs to be pointed out first of
all that the Renaissance era saw the spread of practices of individual devotion
to be carried out primarily in the home…From the theological perspective
attention should then be drawn to the emergence of a new trend that…tended to
identify the mystery of the Incarnation with the Redemption itself, focusing on
the Passion with much less fervour than in the past: whence the growing
popularity of ‘incarnational’
iconographies celebrating the word made flesh, such as pictures of the Infant
Jesus in his mother’s arms…while the demand for images with Christ on the Cross,
very common in the fourteenth century was drastically reduced.***

It would appear that Giorgione has used the same motif
although his angels have become little putti who hover around the scene. The
shepherds represent participants in the Mass who kneel in adoration.

There are many other iconographical details in this painting
that could be discussed. Joseph’s gold robe indicates royal descent from the
House of David. The ox and ass in the cave are symbols of the old order that
has been renewed with the coming of Christ. So too would be the tree trunk next
to the flourishing laurel bush in the left foreground. The laurel is a
traditional symbol of joy, triumph, and resurrection.

Finally, it has been noticed that Giorgione has moved the
main characters off to the right away from their traditional place in the
center. Rather than diminishing their importance this narrative device serves
to make all the action flow from left to right and culminate in the Holy
Family.Giovanni Bellini had done
the same thing in his “St. Francis in the Desert,” and later Titian would use
this device in his Pesaro altarpiece in the Frari.

###

*Two recent catalogs have offered interpretations. See Mario
Lucco’s entry in Brown, David Alan, and Ferino-Pagden, Sylvia, Bellini,
Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting,
Washington, 2006. Also see the very strange interpretation of Wolfgang Eller in
Giorgione
Catalog Raisonne, Petersberg, 2007.

Monday, December 8, 2014

In my interpretation of Giorgione's "Tempest" as "The Rest on the Flight into Egypt", I argued that Giorgione had the audacity to portray a nude Madonna in an attempt to depict Mary as the Immaculate Conception. Although the era of the Renaissance witnessed a tremendous increase in interest in the Immaculate Conception, artists were struggling to find a way to depict the mysterious doctrine that had no settled artistic tradition to use. Below is a section from my paper that sought to explain Giorgione's idiosyncratic use of a nude nursing Madonna as the Immaculate Conception.

The explanation lies in the Catholic doctrine of the
Immaculate Conception, a doctrine of which every Venetian would have been
aware. Simply put, the doctrine affirms that Mary had been created free from
the stain of original sin inherited by every other descendant of Adam and Eve.
Indeed, Mary was regarded as the "new" or "second" Eve.

Significant
developments in the 15th century had brought the idea of the Immaculate
Conception to prominence by the end of the century. In the first place, the
century witnessed a continued increase in devotion to the Madonna, which
naturally led to an increased interest in the "Conception." This
interest was fostered by religious orders, most notably the Franciscans.
Secondly, controversy about the doctrine between the Franciscans and the
Dominicans, the two great teaching orders, contributed to its development.[i]

In 1438 the
Council of Basel, no doubt responding to the upsurge of devotion to Mary,
affirmed the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, but only after Papal
legates and others had left the Council. Without Papal support the Council and
its decrees could not become binding on the Church. Nevertheless, the concept
of the Immaculate Conception had been given tremendous impetus. Nowhere did it
receive greater support than in Venice.

In her
study of Venetian patrons and their piety, Rona Goffenargued that Venice itself became identified
with the Immaculate Conception by the end of the Quattrocento.[ii]
Besides the many churches and innumerable altars dedicated to the Madonna,
churches like S. Maria dei Miracoli and S. Maria della Carita were dedicated
specifically to the "Immaculata." In 1498, the Confraternity of the
Immaculate Conception was founded in Venice, and it worshipped at the Frari's
famous Pesaro altar, itself dedicated to the Immaculate Conception.

Two great figures played a key role in
the spiritual life of Venice in the 15th century. Goffen noted the importance
of the sermons of St. Bernardino of Siena, who was made a patron saint of
Venice in 1470; and of Lorenzo Giustiniani, the saintly first patriarch of the
Republic.

In these and other similar
passages, Bernardino and Giustiniani declared their belief in the Immaculacy of
the Madonna. Their influence on Venetian piety must have been as pervasive
during the Renaissance as it is difficult today to gauge in any precise way.
Nonetheless, their thoughts and writings constitute part--a very important
part--of the original context of sacred art in Renaissance Venice. One must
attempt to reconstruct that context in the historically informed imagination.[iii]

After his death in 1453,
Giustiniani’s sermons circulated widely and were finally published in Venice in
1506.

The Papacy
also played a role. Francesco della Rovere, the scholarly Vicar-General of the
Franciscan order, was elected Pope Sixtus IV in 1471. In the previous year he
had written a treatise on the Immaculate Conception in which he had tried to
reconcile the differing opinions of supporters and opponents. Subsequently, he
added its Feast to the liturgy for the entire Western Church, and ordered new
offices to be composed. One was even composed especially for Franciscan use.

Art
followed doctrine although the doctrine was a difficult subject to render.
After all, it dealt not with Mary's birth but with her conception. Early
attempts in the 15th century had crudely attempted to portray an infant Mary in
the womb of her own mother, Anne. By the end of the century this image, which
bordered on heresy, was being replaced by a combination of three symbolic
images taken from different scriptural sources.

First,
there was the image of the woman crushing the serpent beneath her heel from
Genesis 3:15. The Latin Vulgate gave this passage as, "inimicitias ponam
inter te et mulierem et semen tuum et semen illius ipsa conteret caput tuum et
tu insidiaberis calcaneo eius." "I will put enmity between thee and
the woman, and thy seed and her seed; she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt
lie in wait for her heel." This image first began to appear in the early
15th century.[iv]

Secondly,
there was the image of the spouse from the Song of Songs 4:7, "Thou art
all fair my love, and there is no stain in thee." In this image, the
"tota pulchra es," Mary is not a Madonna holding her infant Son, but
a beautiful woman standing alone and surrounded by images from the Old
Testament that symbolize her purity and role. Rona Goffen noted the prevalence of
this image in the devotional literature of the time especially in the “offices
for the feast of the Immaculate Conception by Nogarolis and by Bernardino de
Bustis.”[v]

Grimani Breviary

Finally,
the image of the woman from the Book of Revelation "clothed with the
sun" with "stars in her crown" and standing on the crescent moon
(which would become the standard after the Reformation) began to appear. These
images were rarely used alone but most often in combination. In the Grimani
Breviary, named for the Venetian cardinal and art collector who was a
contemporary of Giorgione's, there is a miniature of the Woman of the
Apocalypse and the "tota pulchra es."[vi]
Interestingly, on the facing page in the Breviary there is an image of the
“Rest on the Flight into Egypt.”

Grimani Breviary

Advocates of the Immaculate
Conception regarded Mary as a new Eve, whose status was the same as Eve's
before the Fall. Giorgione had the audacity to portray a "nude
Madonna" as Eve would have appeared before the Fall.

Addendum: In the "Tempest" the Madonna's heel is shown over a dead section of a plant that looks like belladonna, a plant associated with witchcraft and the devil. Despite the storm in the background of the painting, the woman is clothed only in bright sunlight. Finally, no one has ever doubted her beauty. She is "all fair." ###

[i] For a
comprehensive discussion of the doctrine and the controversy surrounding it see
The Dogma of the Immaculate Conception, History and Significance,
ed. Edward Dennis O’Connor, University of Notre Dame Press, 1958, c. VI. See
also the article on the Immaculate Conception in The Catholic Encyclopedia,
1910.